We had won. Pimps got out of their polished cars and walked the streets of San Francisco only a little uneasy at the unusual exerc...ise. Gamblers, ignoring their sensitive fingers, shook hands with shoeshine boys.... Beauticians spoke to the shipyard workers, who in turn spoke to the easy ladies.... I thought if war did not include killing, I'd like to see one every year. Something like a festival.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

"Theater of cruelty" means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the ...cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others... like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

All real freedom springs from necessity, for it can be gained only through the exercise of the individual will, and that will can ...be roused to energetic action only by the force of necessity acting upon it from the outside to spur it to effort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field... for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free- floating disagr...eeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »